How can it be argued?

I usually buy Canon printers, but in this city or country they have much less product selection than I'm used to. They had just one laser printer, an HP, which I bought for that reason. That there was only one to chose from.

This printer should print thousands of pages, but after probably less than 1000, it started flashing a 'low toner' error message, which I could at first bypass but then stopped the printer from printing. All the prints are still black. The toner is fine. Online, people comment that companies do this to force you to buy their toner, which they price above other makers and try to force you to require by putting chips on them so the printers won't use toner from other sources. Here, the shops take the chip off and put it on the other maker's toner.

Could HP even make an argument, though, that they aren't a bad company, using these practices?

Earlier-made products in good condition are worth a lot still for this reason. Printers made before they started putting chips in, processors before Intel IME and AMD PCH, Windows systems before Windows 8. Before these companies learned and decided to abuse their customers. For this reason, ARM is favored, since the discovery a year or so ago about what Intel and AMD had in there. People sometimes go from Windows 10 to Windows 7, and use software to prevent telemetry with that organization, and Linux is picking up market share, although some say MS or the organizations controlling it are making their way into the most common Linux distros to do the same thing they did with Windows. And the industries and services that have opened up because of the need to fix printer false limitations.